She purred in agreement.
He never called it by a name. To the world, it was simply "John Persons' kitty." A stray he’d found shivering behind his recycling bin three winters ago, a matted ball of orange fur with one torn ear and eyes the color of sour apple candy. He had intended to call animal control. Instead, he had opened a can of tuna. john persons kitty
John Persons knelt in the damp soil, ruining the knees of his two-hundred-dollar trousers. He did not hesitate. With trembling hands, he gently pried the plastic free. The kitty didn't run. She licked his thumb, her tiny tongue like a grain of sandpaper. She purred in agreement
The kitty was his polar opposite. It was chaotic. It shed on his freshly pressed slacks. It left muddy paw prints on his spotless kitchen floor. It brought him "gifts"—first a desiccated maple leaf, then a slightly chewed lottery ticket (a loser), and finally, the head of a field mouse, which it deposited delicately on his leather briefcase. He had intended to call animal control
The kitty, of course, did not care. It slept in the sunbeam on his "no cats on the furniture" couch. It knocked his carefully alphabetized DVD collection off the shelf. And at 6:17 every evening, without fail, it sat by the front door and let out a tiny, rusty mew .
He found her—he had secretly decided it was a her—huddled under the rhododendron bush by the mailbox. Her leg was caught in the plastic ring of a six-pack holder. She wasn't struggling. She was just waiting, her sour-apple eyes wide and trusting.
That night, he wrote a check to the local animal shelter for five hundred dollars. He ordered a plush cat bed from an online store (it was lavender, a color he had never before allowed into his home). And he finally gave the kitty a name.